Picture a landscape full of moles. Each mole is a researcher. They all wear tiny safety goggles and carry neatly labelled shovels. Each one is digging on their own mound, deeply focused, methodically precise. From above, the landscape looks like a patchwork of little earth piles that never join into a map.
That’s roughly what science looks like when it follows the logic of niches: highly specialised, technically refined, but blind to neighbouring fields and to what lies between the mounds. The problem isn’t that researchers are unintelligent—most of these moles are brilliant—but that the system rewards them for digging deeper, not for looking over the rim.
Those who answer the smallest questions most precisely are more likely to win grants, publications and careers. New mounds appear, new tunnels are dug. After a while, all you see is soil. The bigger picture disappears under your paws.
Not just lone moles – whole packs can burrow too
Anyone who hears this metaphor and thinks “Then they should just team up!” misses the point. Even if moles burrow as a pack—think more like an underground wolf pack—that doesn’t automatically produce a broader view. On the contrary: pack behaviour can intensify gatekeeping, hierarchies and groupthink. Entire research groups, professional societies or subfields can jointly dig the same tunnel and deepen their niche even further.
So the problem isn’t isolation per se but the niche logic itself—whether it’s individual or collective. Specialisation and insulation lose contact with the larger context, with other disciplines, and with the question of how knowledge as a whole fits together.
Why that’s dangerous
When science fragments into mounds and tunnels, several things happen:
🔹Big, integrative questions vanish from the agenda.
🔹Results become less comparable and harder to replicate.
🔹Biases and blind spots pile up because everyone is digging in the same direction.
🔹Gatekeeping and methodological dogmas arise—not out of malice but out of tunnel vision.
In short: you lose not only overview but also objectivity. Many small subjectivities don’t magically add up to objectivity—just as many small tunnels don’t suddenly give you an open view of the landscape.
What it would take
The Molehill Effect doesn’t go away by simply calling for “more teams.” We need structures that reward connecting mounds, breaking through tunnels, visiting neighbouring fields. That means: interdisciplinary projects not as a fig leaf but with real career incentives. It also means: courage for bigger, riskier questions that don’t fit neatly into a grant application. And it means: recognising that objectivity is not an automatic by-product but something that has to be actively cultivated.
Why satire helps
This image of moles, mounds and packs is of course exaggerated. But satire makes visible what usually disappears underground. It’s a reminder that science can be more than the sum of its tunnel systems.
Anyone wanting to read more about how specialisation, bias and the loss of the big picture connect will find a serious treatment of these questions in the linked main article. The Molehill Effect isn’t just a funny image; it’s an invitation to bring more light, air and overview back into research. Find the full article on niche-driven science here.